International Meeting on Syria Cease-Fire Canceled

Efforts to broker a cease-fire in Syria’s war and revive talks to end the five-year-old conflict faltered Friday, after a working group charged with hammering out details of a truce failed to meet.

Under an agreement reached last week by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, a “cessation of hostilities” was to begin on Friday. An international working group was set up to work out logistics of the truce, but Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Friday’s meeting had been canceled—less than a day after she told reporters in the Russian capital that the group, chaired by the U.S. and Russia, would convene as planned and she now didn’t know when it would occur.

“At the moment, the timing for the focus group meeting to end the violence in Syria hasn’t been set,” she said, according to the news agency Interfax. “But the preparatory work is very active.”

In Washington, the State Department said the meeting of the task force hadn’t taken place, but that U.S. officials hoped it would during the course of the night. The meeting hadn’t occurred by close to midnight Geneva time.

Mark Toner, a State Department spokesman, said the U.S. delegation has spoken with Russian counterparts and members of the Syrian opposition and has worked around the clock to get talks going.

“It speaks to the complexity of this undertaking and this effort,” Mr. Toner said. “I think that we don’t yet have full agreement on the modalities of this cease-fire or cessation of hostilities.”

He added: “I think we always knew it would be hard… We can’t stop these kinds of civil wars in an instant; it’s not that easy.”

Late Friday, Jessy Chahine, spokeswoman for Staffan de Mistura, the United Nations special envoy to Syria, said groundwork was still being laid for the task force’s meeting. “Preparatory meetings are still ongoing,” she said.

The delay was a further blow to efforts to halt the bloodshed in Syria, which has left at least 250,000 people dead and forced more than 4.2 million others from their homes, according to the U.N.

The agreement struck by Mr. Kerry and Mr. Lavrov in Munich last Friday also called for humanitarian aid deliveries to besieged areas of Syria to start in a week. A semblance of that understanding materialized Wednesday, with 100 truckloads of aid reaching 80,000 people, the U.N. said.

The cease-fire and the aid deliveries were seen as steps toward reviving U.N.-mediated peace talks, which collapsed earlier this month. The U.S. and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon blamed the breakdown on a stepped-up Syrian government military offensive in northern Syria, including Russian airstrikes.

In his statement suspending the talks, Mr. de Mistura said they would resume on Feb. 25. But in an interview with a Swedish newspaper published Friday, however, the U.N. special envoy conceded that wouldn’t happen.

“I cannot realistically call new Geneva talks for 25th of February,” the daily Svenska Dagbladet quoted him as saying. He said he didn’t know when he would try again to convene the talks, but hoped it would be soon.

“We need real talks about peace, not just talks about talks,” he said. “Now the Americans and Russians must sit down and agree on a concrete plan on the cessation of hostilities.”

The recent escalation of fighting in northern Syria around the city of Aleppo has uprooted tens of thousands of Syrians from their homes and fueled worries of a fresh humanitarian crisis along on the country’s northern border with Turkey. Undeterred by the international push for a cease-fire, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has vowed to retake all of Syria.

In Paris, a French Foreign Ministry spokesman said Friday the Syrian government must do more to the aid convoys to reach areas cut off by a stepped-up government military offensive in the north of the country. More than 500,000 Syrians are completely under siege, while 4.6 million are receiving very little aid, the spokesman said.

“Continuous and unrestricted access to all populations in need must be guaranteed, as required by international humanitarian law and repeated demands of the United Nations Security Council,” the spokesman said.

Fighting in Aleppo continued Friday. Rebels from both the city and the neighboring province of Idlib attacked some government-held neighborhoods of the city, antigovernment activists said.

Meanwhile, government forces and their allied militias appeared to tighten their grip Syria’s western coast and Latakia province, Mr. Assad’s ancestral home. On Thursday, they captured the town of Kansabba, Syria’s state news agency and activists said.